The strange history of the laugh track

Early television comedy borrowed from radio and theatre, where an audience’s laughter was part of the show. When studios began filming comedies without a live audience, something seemed to be missing. The solution, a box of recorded laughter, became one of the most familiar and most argued-over sounds in broadcasting.

Laughter before television

Comedy has always been a shared experience. Music-hall and vaudeville performers timed their routines around the response of the room, and many radio comedies were performed in front of studio audiences whose laughter went out over the air. Listeners at home heard not just the jokes but a crowd enjoying them.

Early television inherited those expectations. When a comedy was broadcast live from a studio with an audience, the laughter came for free. The difficulty arose with shows that were filmed in advance, scene by scene, with no crowd present.

Filming in front of an audience

One influential answer was to film in front of a real audience anyway. I Love Lucy, which began in 1951, was shot on film with several cameras running at once before a live studio audience. That approach gave the show a polished filmed look while keeping genuine laughter, and the multi-camera sitcom became a long-lasting format. But it was not practical for every production, and not every audience laughed on cue.

The machine

In the 1950s, American sound engineer Charley Douglass developed a device that could play back recorded laughter on demand. It became known informally as the “laff box”. It stored many different laughs, from small chuckles to big roars, and the operator could blend them, choosing how long a laugh lasted and how large it sounded. Douglass operated it himself, and his methods were closely guarded; for years he and his company did much of this work for American television.

Sweetening

Adding or boosting laughter in post-production became known as sweetening. It was used in two main ways. On shows filmed without an audience, it created laughter from scratch. On shows filmed before a real audience, it could smooth out the results: extending a laugh that cut off too soon, softening one that went on too long, or covering a joke that had fallen flat on the night.

Why it caught on

Producers believed audiences laughed more when they heard others laughing, and that recorded laughter made filmed shows feel like a shared experience. There is a reasonable basis for the instinct. Laughter is strongly social: people tend to laugh far more in company than alone, and hearing laughter can prompt more of it. Recorded laughter also helped viewers know where the jokes were in a new format, and gave the pacing of a show a steady rhythm.

The backlash

Critics, and some writers and actors, found canned laughter intrusive, as if the show were telling viewers when something was funny. Repeated laughs could become recognisable, and a big roar after a weak line risked drawing attention to the weakness. Some series kept a live studio audience instead; others dropped laughter altogether.

Animated comedies and many sketch and satirical shows showed that audiences could enjoy comedy without hearing a crowd. Later, the rise of single-camera comedies, filmed more like movies with location shooting and quicker cutting, made laughter feel less natural still. Without a theatre-style stage, there was no imagined audience for the laughter to come from.

Common misconceptions

• “All sitcom laughter is fake.” Many multi-camera comedies are recorded in front of real audiences, even if the laughter is adjusted in editing.
• “Laugh tracks were invented to trick viewers.” They grew out of the theatre and radio tradition and an effort to recreate the feeling of watching with others.
• “The laugh track is dead.” It is far less common than it was, but studio audiences and sweetening are still part of some comedies.

What we do not know

Whether recorded laughter actually makes jokes funnier is less clear than its early champions assumed. Studies of canned laughter have produced mixed results, and its effect may depend on how good the joke is, who is watching and whether viewers notice the laughter at all. Tastes have also shifted: many people who grew up with single-camera comedies find a laugh track jarring, while others find it cosy and familiar.

Today

Comedies filmed in front of a studio audience still often use real laughter, sometimes adjusted in editing. Many modern single-camera comedies use no laugh track at all, relying on performances, editing and music to set the rhythm. Whether you love it or hate it, the sound of a 1950s audience laughing may well still be echoing in reruns today.

Try this

Watch an episode of an older sitcom and a recent single-camera comedy back to back. Notice how each signals that a moment is funny: a laugh, a pause, a reaction shot or a sharp cut. Each is a different answer to the same old problem of how to share a joke with someone who is watching alone.